Lenovo ThinkPad E480 Review

ThinkPad laptop has received excellent reputation for its good quality and classic appearance design in the market. Now, ThinkPad has launched its all-new laptop – the ThinkPad E480. The E480 is powered by eighth-generation Core i5-8250U processor and adopts arrow bezel design.

At present, the ThinkPad E480 for test is priced at CNY 5,999 (approximately $910). This variant features a 14-inch 1080p IPS screen and is powered by Core i5-8250U processor. It comes with 8GB DDR4 2400 and 256GB PM961 SSD.

Appearance Design

The ThinkPad E480 keeps ThinkPad series’ classic appearance design in the meantime adopts currently popular narrow bezel design. The screen’s bezels on the left and right only measure 6.9mm. The whole fuselage uses black engineering plastics. The ThinkPad’s logo is placed at the left top corner of the top cover.

The ThinkPad E480 continues to adopt ThinkPad’s classic keyboard design which has received good comments from users. To provide the better feel of the keyboard, the ThinkPad E480 adopts 1.8mm long key travel. The keyboard design of the ThinkPad E480 reaches top-level.

The laptop still features ThinkPad series’ unique touchpad design which supports multi-touch. In general, the touchpad provides the good user experience.

As an office laptop, the ThinkPad E480 pre-install office system. In the meantime, we can see the labels of Intel and AMD.

The left side of the laptop provides a Type-C port with charging support, an HDMI port with 4K video output support and two USB 3.0 ports. The audio port adopts two-in-one design.

The right side of the laptop provides a USB 2.0 port, an RJ45 port and the SD. The ThinkPad E480 uses Micro SD which is not common to see in the laptops instead of SD for the camera.

Internal Structure

After removing the back cover, we can see its internal structure. The ThinkPad E480 comes with a fan and dual heat pipe for heat dissipation. The laptop provides two DIMM slots. We can see a PCI-E M.2 SSD port and a place for a 2.5-inch hard drive. The E480 for test doesn’t install the hard drive.

Screen Test

The laptop features a 14-inch IPS screen with the resolution of 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels. After using Datacolor Spyder 5 Elite to test the screen, we find its NTSC color gamut only covers 47%, which shows that the screen only reaches common color level.

CPU Performance Test

According to the result on the CinBench R15, the ThinkPad E480’multi-core performance reaches 525cb, and its single-core performance reaches 140cb. The processor’s performance reaches the seventh-generation i5-7300HQ processor which means that the processor that the ThinkPad E480 is powered by has quite good performance.

GPU Performance Test

The RX550’s graphics card gets 2,884 scores on the 3DMark Fire Strike, which means that the user can enjoy fluent online games.

SSD Performance Test

The ThinkPad E480 comes with a 256GB PM961 M.2 PCIe SSD from Samsung. From the test result, we can see that SSD’s sequential read speed is 1500MB/s and its sequential write speed reaches 1290MB/s. These data show that the SSD has excellent performance. More Lenovo laptop with an M.2 slot, please check out our M.2 SSD compatibility list.

Heat Dissipation Test

After testing the laptop for 3 minutes, we find that the ThinkPad E480 has poor performance on heat dissipation. However, as far as an office laptop is concerned, the ThinkPad E480’s heat dissipation performance can be accepted.

Battery Life

The ThinkPad E480 sports a lithium battery with the capacity of 45Wh. After the test on playing a 1080p video, we find that the battery can last 7 to 8 hours.

Summary

In general, the ThinkPad E480 for approximately $910 has good cost performance. The laptop has high screen ratio with the narrow bezel design. Besides, the ThinkPad E480 boosts of excellent workmanship and excellent feel of the keyboard as well as comprehensive port design. If you are looking for a laptop for daily office work, the ThinkPad E480 will be a good choice for you.